The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

It turns out that our innate parenting instinct is perfectly calibrated to ensure the provision of the thing many “experts” would have us ignore: the child’s developmental needs. And here’s a plot twist: we are not talking only about children’s needs. In a real sense, we cannot even speak about the infant’s needs without considering those of the mother. “There is no such thing as a baby,” the British pediatrician D. W. Winnicott once said, explaining, “If you show me a baby, you certainly show me someone else who is caring for the baby . . . One sees a ‘nursing couple’ . . . The unit is not the individual, the unit is the individual-environment set-up.”[5] Or, in Ashley Montagu’s words, “When a baby is born, a mother is born. There is considerable evidence that at this time, and for months thereafter, her needs for contact exceed those of the infant.”[6] Good thing, too: Were there not built-in physiological and emotional incentives for the ones doing the caregiving, parenthood would be even more of a slog than it already is. Fewer babies would have their survival needs met if fulfilling those needs were not rewarding for parents. With its usual brilliance, our interpersonal-biological makeup dictates that our requirements be mutual. (One of the unfortunate impacts of our culture’s way of doing things is that stress tends to whittle down these innate rewards, making parenting more frustrating and daunting than it rightly ought